5 Days of Birding: Day One, Madera Canyon

On Thursday, March 27 I picked Kathryn up from the Tucson Airport. While she drove to the Salt Lake City airport in a snow flurry, she arrived to sunshine and 80 degrees here in Tucson. We drove home through the Sonoran Desert, past cactus, mesquite, Palo Verde and acacia. Wildflowers bloomed in profusion painting the roadside a rainbow of colors. Once home she settled her stuff in her room, changed her cloths to suit the weather, and we were off to Madera Canyon.

We parked at the Madera picnic area and started our hike along the creek towards the amphitheater where Jean, my naturalist friend, had told me she had seen Montezuma Quail a couple of days before. It wasn’t long before we found some acorn woodpeckers and Kathryn was adding new species to her life list. While we never found the Montezuma quail, we did find an Arizona woodpecker on a tree near the road.

The Arizona woodpecker is our only brown woodpecker. Its range is mostly in the mountains of Mexico but it extends into the United States here in Arizona due to the fact that woodpeckers don’t observe international boundaries. Its favored habitat is mountainous oak woods. Similar to the Hairy woodpecker but with a shorter tail, we found this female clinging to the side of a live oak tree chipping away at the bark. It seemed unconcerned with our presence and went about its business of ripping off chunks of bark and examining the underside. I watched amazed at the contortions of its head as it twisted its neck to listen or peer under the bark. Then, it would hammer away at the trunk, stop, reach in with its bill and gobble something up, then start the process all over again. This was only my third time seeing the Arizona woodpecker and certainly the longest and best view I have ever had of it. We watched it work for 15 minutes or more, then finally left it to forage as we continued down the road to our car.

From there we followed the road to the top and then down to the Proctor Trailhead. I have often seen ladder-backed woodpeckers in this area as well as warblers along the creek. Before we even parked our car we saw two canyon towhees hopping about under the trash bin in front of us. We disembarked and headed down the trail through the charred remnants of a fire that happened in this area a couple of years ago. Blackened ocotillo scraped the pale blue skies, charcoal mesquite trees contorted leafless in the fields. A barrel cactus scorched by flames was a spineless ribbed ball sitting on the ground amidst dried grasses that are springing back to life.

Down by the sycamore tree along the creek the yellow-rumped warblers merrily searched the newly sprouted leaves for insects. We searched the treetops for a black-throated gray warbler and finally found him. Then we continued across Proctor Road and up the trail to where it a canyon towhee called from a bush near the creek. I had never wandered up this far before and marveled at the white rock as the water tumbled over it. Over time the water has carved it into such interesting sculptural shapes and it gleamed like white satin in the late afternoon sun.

Farther down the trail looped through a wooded meadow and the afternoon was silent. Here the silence and shadows engulfed us in quiet and we walked peacefully along the trail, each lost in her own thoughts. It was almost like you could feel geologic time and I felt the briefness of my life and the ghosts of the past in that place.

Soon we saw motion ahead and I awakened from my reverie to see what was hopping about on the ground. A small flock of pink-sided juncos was searching for food in the undergrowth. We watched them with their dark eyes and pink bills poking among the grass and stones, and then we headed on down the trail and back to the parking lot. We were almost there when the ladder-backed woodpecker showed up. It clung to an ocotillo branch and drummed against its thorny side before flying off to another farther away from the path. It was a good first day of birding with Kathryn adding three woodpeckers, a Mexican jay, and a broad-billed hummingbird to her life list.